The Shadow of Saganami

she hadn't been invited to eat there no less than three times in the last week.

On the other hand, I haven't been expected to pull my full watch assignment on board ship as well as going haring off dirt-side every time Van Dort does, either.

She was surprised Helen didn't show more signs of exhaustion. She was spending most of her putative free time assisting Van Dort aboard ship, whenever she wasn't somewhere on the planet with him. She was still finding time-somehow-for regular exercise and sparring sessions, but that was about it, and her bunk time was suffering. Still, there did seem to be the odd half-hour here and there Ragnhild couldn't quite account for. And, interestingly enough, there seemed to be matching holes in Paulo d'Arezzo's known whereabouts.

The thought of Helen spending time with the too-pretty midshipman was fairly preposterous. But not as preposterous as it would once have been, she reminded herself. Something had happened to alter their relationship, and no one else in Snotty Row seemed to have any idea what it might have been. Whatever it was, it didn't seem to have any romantic overtones-thank God-but it was all very odd. And if she and Paulo were sneaking off somewhere, where was it? As big as Hexapuma was, there weren't that many places aboard her where two people could evade observation.

No, she told herself once again, it had to be a simple coincidence.

'Hawk— Papa-One, Flight Ops,' Lieutenant Sheets said suddenly.

'Flight Ops, Hawk-Papa-One,' Ragnhild acknowledged.

'Hawk— Papa-One, you are cleared to Hexapuma Alpha's current location. Flight path Tango Foxtrot to Brewster Interplanetary, Pad Seven-Two. Contact Brewster Flight Control on Navy Channel Niner-Three at the two hundred klick line for final approach instructions.'

'Flight Ops, Hawk-Papa-One copies flight path Tango Foxtrot to Brewster Interplanetary, Pad Seven-Two, contacting Brewster Flight Control on November Charlie Niner-Three at the two-zero-zero klick line for final approach instructions.'

'Hawk— Papa-One, Flight Ops. Confirm. You are cleared to separate at your discretion.'

'Flight Ops, Hawk-Papa-One separating now.' She looked over her shoulder at the pinnace's flight engineer. 'Chief, disengage the umbilicals.'

'Disengage umbilicals, aye, Ma'am.' The flight engineer tapped commands into his console and watched telltales flicker from green, through red, to amber as the pinnace's service connections to the ship were severed.

'Confirm all umbilicals disengaged, Ms. Pavletic.'

'Thank you, Chief.' Ragnhild glanced over her own displays, doublechecking the umbilicals' status, and nodded in satisfaction. She keyed her mike again. 'Flight Ops, Hawk-Papa-One confirms clean separation at zero- niner-thirty-five.'

'Hawk— Papa-One, Flight Ops. Confirm. You are cleared to apply thrust.'

'Flight Ops, Hawk-Papa-One. Applying thrust now.'

The pinnace's bow thrusters flared as Ragnhild backed the sleek craft out of its docking arms. She watched the boat bay bulkhead's smart-painted range marks and numbers glide past as the pinnace moved slowly astern. She came up on the departure mark exactly on the tick and at exactly the correct velocity, she noted with pleasure, and the reaction thrusters gimbaled upward, pushing the pinnace down and out of the bay. Once she had sufficient separation, she dropped the nose, closed the bow thruster ports, and engaged the main thrusters. This flight would be too short to bother with the impeller wedge-they'd already be configuring for atmosphere by the time they were sufficiently clear of the ship to activate the wedge-and she settled back to enjoy a good old-fashioned airfoil flight.

* * *

'Well, this is a fine kettle of fish,' Aivars Terekhov commented sourly as he finished reading the last of his personal dispatches from Rear Admiral Khumalo and Baroness Medusa.

'That's certainly one way to put it,' Van Dort agreed. His personal dispatches were even more voluminous than Terekhov's, and he was still reading. He looked up from the current message and grimaced.

'Joachim Alquezar commented to me once that Aleksandra Tonkovic, just after the Nemanja bombing, said something to the effect that we wouldn't need a silver bullet to kill Nordbrandt. I'm beginning to wonder about that.'

'It does seem she has some sort of evil fairy looking out for her, doesn't it?' Terekhov said sourly.

'So far, at any rate. But what's impressed me even more than her unpleasant propensity for surviving is her sheer malevolence. You do realize that by now she's killed something over thirty-six hundred people, most of them civilians, in her bombing attacks alone?'

'Which doesn't even count the wounded. Or the cops-or the frigging firemen!' Terekhov snarled, and Van Dort looked up quickly.

Even that mild an obscenity was unusual from Terekhov. Van Dort and the Manticoran captain had become quite close over the thirty-five days he'd spent aboard Hexapuma . He liked and admired Terekhov, and he'd come to know the Manticoran well enough to realize that that language indicated far more anger from him than it would have from someone else.

'She's certainly a very different proposition from Westman,' the Rembrandter said after a moment. 'And the people she's recruited obviously have much more deep-seated grievances than Westman does.'

'To put it mildly.' Terekhov tipped his chair back behind his desk and cocked his head at Van Dort. 'I'm not really familiar with Split,' he said, 'and the standard briefing on the system was fairly superficial, I'm afraid. My impression, though, is that the system's economy and government is set up quite differently from Montana's.'

'They are,' Van Dort said. 'Economically, Montana's beef and leatherwork command decent prices even in other systems here in the Cluster, and they also ship it Shell-ward. They have some extractive industries in their asteroid belt, also for export, and they don't import all that much. By and large their industry's domestically self-sufficient for the consumer market, although their heavy industry's more limited. They import heavy machine tools, and all their spacecraft are built out-system, for example. And their self-sufficiency stems in part from the fact that they're willing to settle for technology that's adequate to their needs but hardly cutting edge.

'Montana isn't a wealthy planet by any stretch, but it maintains a marginally favorable trade balance and there isn't actually any widespread poverty. That's an unusual accomplishment in the Verge, and whether Westman and his people want to admit it or not, the RTU's shipping strength is one reason they're able to pull it off.

'The other way Montana differs from Kornati is that it's much easier, relatively speaking, for someone who works his posterior off and enjoys at least a little luck to move from the lowest income brackets to a position of comparative affluence. These people make an absolute fetish out of rugged individualism, and there's still a lot of unclaimed land and free range. Their entire legal code and society are set up to encourage individual enterprise to use those opportunities, and their wealthier citizens look aggressively for investment opportunities.

'Kornati's a much more typical Verge planet. They don't have an attractive export commodity, like Montana's beef. There's not enough wealth in the system to attract imports from outside the Cluster, and although their domestic industry's growing steadily, the rate of increase is low. Since they have nothing to export, but still have to import critical commodities-like off-world computers, trained engineers, and machine tools-if they want to build up their local infrastructure, their balance of trade's... unfavorable, to say the very least. That exacerbates the biggest economic problem Kornati faces: lack of investment capital. Since they can't attract it from outside, what they really need is to find some way to pry loose enough domestic investment to at least prime the pump the way other systems have managed.

'The Dresden System, for example, was even poorer than Split thirty T-years ago. By now, Dresden's on the brink of catching up with Split, and even without the possibility of the annexation, Dresden's gross system product would probably pass Split's within the next ten T-years. It's not that Dresden's wealthier than Split-in fact, the system's actually quite a bit poorer. It's just that the Dresdeners've managed to begin a self-sustaining domestic expansion by encouraging entrepreneurship and taking advantage of every opportunity-including energetic cooperation with the RTU-that falls their way. The oligarchs on Kornati, by and large, are more interested in sitting on what they have than in risking their wealth in the sorts of enterprises which might bolster the economy as a whole. They aren't quite a kleptocracy, and that's about the best I can say for them.'

The Rembrandter's expression mirrored his contempt for the ruling families of Split, and he shook his